Farrel (Ric) Robinson, Ph.D.
Associate Professor Department of Biological Structure

robinsn@u.washington.edu

Major Education:
BA, Psychology, University of Chicago
Ph.D., Psychology, Brown University

Research Interests:
My laboratory uses eye movements in trained monkeys to study the role of the cerebellum in voluntary movements. The cerebellum is the highly folded structure sitting on top of the brainstem under the back of the cerebral cortex. It influences every movement we make and contains at least 2X the number of neurons as the cerebral cortex. Despite its importance and the fact that it represents a huge investment of brain resources , we know very little about what it does or how it does it. Eye movements are a good model system in which to investigate the cerebellum because of their accuracy and the fact that monkeys make thousands of them in a single day. To work out the role of the cerebellum in movement we use three types of experiments. To understand what signals the cerebellum produces we record from single neurons in a monkey's cerebellum as the monkey makes eye movements. To work out where these signals go we use anatomical tracing of cerebellar outputs. Finally to understand what these signals contribute to movements we temporarily anesthetize the eye movement-related regions of the cerebellum and measure abnormalities in monkey eye movements. Together these methods are producing an increasingly clear picture of cerebellar function.